Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data processing, and in particular to systems and methods for performing search indexing and providing search results.
Description of the Related Art
Conventional search applications are structured to work when searching a single index or displaying a single results set from another search provider. However, conventional search applications fail to provide an effective means to combine the search results into a single unified view and allow the user to interact with all search results in one place.
For example, many search engines will either not handle data that has not been processed directly by that search engine or will show the results sets in multiple separate view panes or tabs that must be reviewed separately and cannot be sorted or refined together. If the user needs to find more items or execute another search, the user must adjust the search terms and then page through the results sets tab by tab. Because of the difficulty of review, the user will often abandon search efforts or choose to review just one set or tab of the search results, or will stop refining the search while there are still numerous results and will adopt a tedious review of each responsive item in the results set.